Right, yeah, buffer, the campaign had a lot of buffers.
Trump’s a pimp. He never could’ve out-fought Hillary. But I didn’t know until this day that it was Putin all along.
LOL! Good one.
No new information in this article, but it pulls in some other events in a way that I think maybe starts to explain what was going on:
At the moment, I think that there are probably two dominant theories:
A) Trump’s campaign was infiltrated by Russia and, while unfortunate, there’s not much that we can really chastise them on for it (beyond being stupid).
Or…
B) The Trump campaign had some sort of deal going with Russia. Probably not to cheat the election, but some form of financial gain for pro-Russian interests.
With option B, it’s never been real clear what the deal was exactly. The Steele Dossier made it look like Trump was being blackmailed. There’s some reason to think that Trump has been involved in money laundering and so, again, might have been being blackmailed. But the problem with both of these theories is that they assume that the Russians believed that Trump was plausibly going to become President and, from the timeline, that has just never been very plausible. Late in the game, it became clear that Trump had an actual chance of making it. But back when much of this would have begun, it seems unlikely that Trump would actually win, and there’s no real value in blackmailing some schlub that you don’t expect to amount to something.
But that’s all assuming that the Russians did want Trump to win. But as we’ve already noted, they didn’t expect him to and they certainly couldn’t have predicted that whatever troll bots they threw at the problem, that they’d have the budget to compete with an American campaign. Historically, Russian attempts to steer an American election have not proved particularly successful.
On the other hand, option A also doesn’t make much sense. Why go through the hassle of infiltrating people in Donald Trump’s waste of a campaign? If you expect him to win then, sure, you’re going to have people placed to enact Russian policy. But surely if Trump is elected, all of the agents are going to be quickly discovered and everything is going to fall apart pretty quickly. No one cares about the loser (none of us care much about what dealings the Clintons might have had with Russia or China, for example), but at least half the country is going to care a great deal if Trump’s team is strangely pro-Russia, and they’re going to investigate the question.
I think that if we change our viewpoint from “winning elections” to “advertising”, though, then maybe things start to make a bit more sense.
On Trump’s side of things, I don’t think that they believed that they could win the Presidency. On Russia’s side of things, they didn’t think that Trump could win the Presidency.
The deal was, simply, to advertise on behalf of Russia. Having a guy running around on stage with all of the serious politicians at serious political events, giving speeches that were pro-Russia to the general American public, seemed like it would help to get the US to be less focused on penalizing Russia for having taken over the Ukraine.
And in return, Russia would grant some great business deals to Trump - maybe a Trump building in Moscow, maybe some shares in Rosneft, who knows. Team Trump doesn’t think they’re going to get anywhere near the Presidency, so hey why not?
Manafort is brought in to lead the effort of convincing the American public that they should be pro-Russia, and Trump does his bit of just saying whatever makes the people happy - not really thinking about what he’s saying at all, or caring about consistency because that’s not the job, just throwing everything at the wall and carrying over whatever worked from one rally to the next.
The problem comes that the Trump campaign starts to enter the realm of looking competitive. Trump dumps Manafort, starts denying knowing who Felix Sater is, etc. Russia switches from advertising mode to winning mode, dials down the communication with team Trump, but starts dumping resources into promoting him, releases the Clinton emails, etc.
Trump wins the election.
Russia probably realizes that all or most of everything that transpired is going to get found out, so they decide to go ahead and push for an immediate drop of the sanctions, hoping that there will be enough murkiness around the issue for the sanctions to ever be fully restored. But pretty much as soon as Flynn tries to sell anyone on this, the portcullis comes down, everyone in Congress realizes that something funny is going on.
The Republican party is in a bad spot because they’re probably pretty certain that Trump had a deal with the Russians, but they don’t know what it is and it’s certain to kill the party but, at the same time, the alternative is to have a traitor the nation serving as President. Ultimately, they decide to approve any and all investigations that they can and get to work on some resolutions to prevent the sanctions being loosened. (One loosening slips through.)
Trump realizes - later than everyone else - that the gig is up and that he’s going to be found out. In a fit of stupidity, he decides to fire the head of the FBI. His deputy AG, Rosenstein, on talking with Trump, pretty swiftly comes to the understanding that Trump is guilty as hell of something, decides to go along with Trump far enough to write a crappy letter of justification for the firing, and then almost immediately goes to the Senate Intelligence Committee to tell them that he thinks that Trump is hella guilty of something and the political process is too slow, leaky, and politicized for this to be how the keep proceeding. So, after some discussion, they decide to bring in Mueller to lead an independent counsel.
Perhaps I am wrong, but after much consideration and a lot of reading, I think that this will end up being the main story. This isn’t to say that Trump isn’t guilty of money laundering and who knows what else. Potentially, the campaign did try to send info to Russia to help them with the campaign. I don’t know. But if there was a deal with Russia, I don’t think that it was to receive help to win the election. I think it was a deal to act as a pro-Russian agent in the US. And so if Trump did break a crime, it would be the same one as Flynn and Manafort are getting in trouble for: They didn’t register as agents for a foreign state.
For anyone interested, I’ll also note that breaking the Foreign Agents Registration Act, while rarely prosecuted, results in a criminal trial with a sentence of up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, or both
http://kleptocracyinitiative.org/2017/07/briefing-paper-the-foreign-agents-registration-act/
One case where the actors were fully prosecuted and convicted:
You don’t have to know Trump has a good shot to want blackmail material on him or to bribe him to do what you want.
Russia wants divisions in American society. Trump promotes that regardless if he wins or not. Think he was just going to disappear if he lost? He was sowing a hell of a lot of seeds about Clinton rigging the election. He was undermining American democracy one way or the other.
He and his business partner Rick Davis have been playing this game for a long time. In 2008, the WaPo reported that in 2006, candidate John McCain was introduced to Deripaska. The meeting was supposedly ‘social’ not a private briefing.
So, there is a pattern here. Either presidential candidates routinely meet with Russian oligargarchs or someone is playing a very long game with our political system.
…Or they keep pushing the limits. McCain was a standard reach-out to a standing Senator prior to him becoming a candidate for the Presidency. I don’t think this comes close to “giving ‘private briefings’ during the campaign” by the then campaign manager.
I see the IRS investigators are sharing info with Mueller.
I don’t know, ISTM that the most dominant theory, FWIW, is something you didn’t mention altogether. That being, that the Russians wanted Trump to win the election, and Trump wanted Trump to win the election, so they had a natural confluence of interest. The Russians were willing to help Trump win in all sorts of nefarious ways, and Trump, wanted their efforts to succeed, went along and helped them in various unspecified ways. Aka “colluded with the Russians”.
A possible variant of that theory is that the Russians thought Trump had little chance to win but thought attacking the eventual winner (i.e. Clinton) had a value of its own, but that Trump was willing to go along with that for his own purposes.
That said, I don’t buy any of this. But that seems to be the main theory, as opposed to what you propose here, AFAICT.
IMO you’re wrong and that will not end up being the main story. 
I don’t see that at all. To me it looks like an attempt by Manafort to make some bucks on the side, and/or set himself up for future employment or consulting opportunities with this guy (his former employer) or others.
Seems pretty disloyal to Trump, frankly. But I don’t see any reason that the offer can’t be interpreted to be exactly what it purported to be.
I think it is without a doubt that Russians took actions that damaged Clinton during the election and it is also without a doubt that the Trump campaign benefitted from those actions.
There is an investigation going on to determine if any of those actions were illegal and if anyone can be prosecuted for those actions. It is also possible, and in my mind likely, that other illegal activity, not directly related to the election, will be uncovered and prosecuted by these investigators.
Possible, but what advantage is there to working together in any way? Dump the files onto WikiLeaks and you’ll have the American press colluding with you the next day, and not a single message exchanged to make it happen.
If there’s no need of coordination, why go to the hassle and risk of coordinating?
This too. The Trump campaign was like the little brother of the criminal who is actually in on the heist. They knew something was going on and they wanted in soooo bad, but big brother was like, “Just stay out of my before you get hurt.” But little brother doesn’t like taking no for an answer and did something dumb like hiding in the trunk of big bro’s car with his pal Chim-Chim in order to get closer to the action. In doing so little bro may have fell back asswards into a criminal conspiracy.
Pretty easy to whip up a scenario where Pubbies assist Russians unwittingly. Force of habit, if nothing else.
Boris and Natasha take a break from pursuing Moose and Squirrel, set up a “Pro-Trump” PAC, dedicated to promoting sound governance blah blah blah. Americans for Crunchy Goodness has Pubbie boney Fidos, introductions.endorsements, you know the drill. Boy, they got a great idea, to advertise on social media and spread the good word to carefully targeted audiences. And the beauty part, hey, is that its self propelled! Your racist uncle sees an ad he likes, he shares it with somebody else’s racist uncle, who he knows will like it! Two makes four makes eight…
Would help a lot if Boris and Natasha could get some solid demographic data to work with! Wonder if anybody has some?
I’m on the conservative wing of the extreme left. My FB pages didn’t have anything about how BLM was selling babie to buy heroin, mine were about how Hillary kidnapped Bernie’s grand-daughter. Stuff stroking and inflaming the Hillary/Bernie schism, and I don’t mean once in a while, I mean every friggin’ time! You click, try to find out who it is, and they didn’t exist yesterday, and they won’t exist tomorrow, when we hear about how Hillary is taking orders to screw over Bernie from the Maoist Lesbian Collective she joined at Wellesley!
I swear, I am not making this up, i saw this *happen. * I didn’t think Russians, just thought “Evil, must be Republican rat fuck!” Should have noticed how smart it was, which would have totally let them off the hook.
TL:DR Yes, the Russians helped Trump. No, he didn’t know because no way a guy backstabs his way to the top of KGB by trusting dim-witted motormouths to keep a secret.
Correction: Putin was very far from “the top of KGB”.
The Russians told the Trump campaign that the Russian government was trying to help elect him. I think Trump is a big dumb idiot, but he’s supposed to be a micromanager. It seems unreasonable to think he was unaware of Russian help. His son would have to tried to keep him in the dark and his repeated references to help from Russia, including referencing future leaks and reading Russia propaganda almost simultaneously as it was released into the public… yeah, he fucking knew.
I find it an absolutely fascinating “coincidence” that the specific divisive issues pushed by Russian propaganda during the election are the exact same divisive issues pushed by Trump today; namely, whipping up xenophobia against Muslims, racism toward blacks and Hispanics, general Hillary hatred and exploitation of the few cracks between Bernie Sanders and Clinton.
Such specific data.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Technically true, but extremely misleading, since he was the director of the FSB, which succeeded the KGB.
He was appointed to that post and only was there for a year. Before that, he was a run-of-the-mill fairly low-rank (lieutenant colonel) KGB officer.